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Inside the classic Stanley Hotel, a new culinary tradition

By Josie Sexton;
4:34 p.m. MST February 18, 2014

People enjoy a five-course meal at the Stanley’s new restaurant, Table, which is currently featuring a new dinner series, Great Roads to Great Chefs. The series, which runs through April, features a different guest chef from around the United States each weekend.
(Photo:
Erin Hull/The Coloradoan
)

After the meal, the chef comes out to greet his diners, all 20 of them; they turn full-bellied in their chairs to hear about his inspiration.

It is around 9:30 on a February Friday night, snow covering Estes Park below, and The Stanley hotel, perched atop the town, is glowing. From inside The Stanley’s new boutique hotel, The Lodge, a fire has been burning for more than three hours.

This is the second installment of an 11-week dinner series, Great Roads to Great Chefs, at the hotel. Every Friday and Saturday now through April, a different guest chef from Colorado and across the United States comes to Estes Park to spend a weekend cooking in the landmark hotel’s unconventional new restaurant.

Table, named for its intimate, two-table design, was inaugurated last summer with a dinner series featuring The Stanley’s Cascades Restaurant chef Richard Beichner. Since then, the boutique’s restaurant has, for the most part, gone unused. During the current dinner series, visiting chefs are assisted by Beichner and his sous chef in the kitchen and in the dining room by a quick staff of four. There are only 20 seats available for diners, with one fixed menu.

“This is actually going back to what (dinner) used to be,” said visiting chef Alec Schuler, owner of Arugula Ristorante in Boulder.

As Schuler comes out of the kitchen, following his meal, there is a round of applause. He gives a small bow and then begins speaking about the night’s selection of wines, which he had picked first, the paired food, which came after, and the style, which was influenced by multiple trips to many regions around the globe but discovered finally on family tables of Northern Italy.

“I’ve traveled all over, and it’s just my favorite,” Schuler said of his culinary tradition, joking about 14-course menus that took “like eight hours to eat, and with a cigarette between every course.”

Schuler’s depiction of the epic Italian meal is not too far from the atmosphere at The Lodge, where the diners have just enjoyed a carefully crafted five-course meal accompanied by five handpicked and paired wines.

For guests that night, it was a mere three hours of eating and drinking. For their dinner, for Schuler’s and the staff’s time and for that unique Rocky Mountain ambiance, each guest paid $100, a portion of which will be donated to flood relief.

Just five months after flooding abruptly cut off the popular tourist destination, Estes’ most famous attraction is giving residents of the Front Range a reason to drive back up U.S. Highway 34, in the off-season. Inside The Stanley’s original Manor House, which is a three-story estate next door to the main hotel, recently remodeled to become The Lodge, the atmosphere still feels like a well-kept local secret, or the impeccably designed summer house of a long-lost relative.

The guests, couples and small groups of friends, are even seated like family along two knotty pine tables, before a warm fireplace, in a room that can only be described as sunny, even by night. If The Stanley is the haunted hotel of Estes’ past, The Lodge is its bright and beautifully designed future. The wood here is lighter, the ornate molding whiter, and the windows are sunbursts facing West.

Over the course of a few hours, diners were asked to sit back and get to know each other while being served small plates, starting with light hors d’ oeuvres and cocktails, crescendoing to meatier dishes and glasses fuller-bodied, at least in chef Schuler’s case.

The meal, Schuler said, was modeled after his wine pairing dinners at Arugula.

“I felt totally comfortable tonight because I do this eight times a year,” Schuler told his guests.

Indeed, it went off without a hitch. After the finger foods and initial mingling, brown buttered calamari and a perfectly al dente risotto were the first two courses to be served at the tables. They had one guest commenting to his wife about the relatively small size of the portions.

By course three, he and the others had fallen all but silent to a Livornese fish stew — mussels, dorado and melt-in-your-mouth shrimp, all soaking up the fennel and orange zest flavors of a charred tomato broth.

“Do you have any bread to get the rest of this?” one diner smiled to a waiter.

The grand finale, a blood-pink Colorado rib eye roast that, according to host and sommelier Phil Armstrong, could “hold up to the big boy” of the evening’s wine, a 2009 Zenato Amarone della Valpolicella. Served on a bed of seared kale, sweet potato and squash, it was the perfect winter warmer, only to be undone by a raspberry tiramisu and a glass of Bera sparkling Brachetto.

At some point near the end of the meal and at one giggling end of the table, a group of five women, previously strangers, leaned in, sharing stories as others sat back in their chairs, relaxing.

“It’s so fun to see you girls,” said one woman, who is a resident of Estes Park and has five grown daughters. “This could be like our family.”